George IV’s death in June 1830 was hard for Princess Elizabeth in Homburg. She had been much affected by her sister Royal’s death twenty months before, especially because, after their initial reunion at Ludwigsburg at Christmas in 1820, the two had visited each other several times. Then Elizabeth’s husband, the Landgrave, died in April 1829 after complications, following a bout of influenza, when an old leg wound broke out. ‘No woman was ever more happy than I was for eleven years,’ she wrote, ‘and they will often be lived over again in the memory of the heart.’ But the train of Elizabeth’s life as a widow did not alter greatly, given that Bluff’s younger bachelor brother Louis, the new Landgrave, was so congenial, so eager to enter into all her ideas for embellishing Homburg – with her income.
Now the death of George IV had removed a brother who had, in the widowed Landgravine’s eyes, been ‘all heart, and had he been left to his own judgement, would ever have been kind and just. But people got hold of him, and flattery did more harm in that quarter than anything’. Comparing her brother and father, she observed, ‘My brother was always in a dazzle. My father was always seeing things composedly, sensibly, and seeing much further into the danger of what such and such things would produce.’
Elizabeth had been at Hanover and, around the time of her sixtieth birthday, on the point of setting out for England with the Cambridges in May 1830 to spend a year there, ‘making the dear King my first object’, as she told Sir William Knighton, when she heard that George IV was ill. She had written cheerfully to him a month earlier, ‘Only promise when I am with you, that you look upon me as a quiet old dog to whom you can say, “Now leave me, go for a month to Mary” – and so on, without an idea of offending. In the way I shall not be, for once in my own room and not with you, I have employment enough never to annoy anyone.’ Now, surmising correctly that she would not see the King again, she begged Knighton from Hanover, ‘Put by a glass or a cup, or any trifle, ever so small, that he has used, even a pocket handkerchief which he has used, for me.’
Elizabeth proceeded, despite her brother’s death, to England with the Cambridge family, who were going to leave eleven-year-old Prince George to be educated there. It would never, she told Knighton, in a letter she wrote from Brighton later that year, have been an easy journey, as she had ‘nearly lost the use of her legs’ since the ‘shock of the Landgrave’s death’. Now it was a journey made in sorrow. Not only was King George IV dead, but every corner of London and Windsor recalled him to his sister’s mind. Windsor Castle, in particular, called forth painful thoughts. It was ‘a very severe trial’ to Elizabeth to find herself in ‘that magnificent castle, and the being I most valued and loved gone; everything which I saw showing his taste, and every spot calculated to please and delight – his own formation.’ She told Knighton, ‘I give you my word, I went about half dead … you may believe the wound is far from healed, though I am able to show myself and appear cheerful in society’
To reflect the changes that had occurred in Homburg since Fritz’s death, Elizabeth had recently remade her will, leaving to the new Landgrave Louis all her ‘funded property’ – £36,000 – in England, and her ‘library, prints, drawings’, many of which she had brought on marriage from England. The rest of her bequests were mementoes, snuffboxes, bracelets, which she parcelled out in her will between her family in England and her in-laws in Homburg. Now in London she herself received mementoes. George IV had left her two snuffboxes filled with his own mixture. Elizabeth, who had once said she hated the stuff her mother and eldest brother took with such enjoyment, was overjoyed, and declared, ‘The snuff will never be taken out, so dear is it to me.’
But barely a month after she had arrived in England, Elizabeth spoke of leaving, her nerves frayed by the double exertion of mourning her brother and of adapting to the new reign. Her brother King William’s behaviour was lamented by many. First, he created his eldest son George Fitzclarence, Earl of Munster, and gave all his illegitimate children the titles of the younger sons and daughters of a marquess. Then he went into mourning upon the death of the husband of his illegitimate daughter Augusta Fitzclarence, the Hon. John Kennedy-Erskine, which scandalized many. After a military review, the new King put on plain clothes and went rambling up Pall Mall. To cap it all, his wife Adelaide’s complexion was muddy.
There was nothing of majesty here, and people began to remember George IV with kindness. However, Elizabeth took a liking to the comfortable company of William and Adelaide, and busily ‘sided’ with her brother when he condemned the Duchess of Kent’s upbringing of their niece Victoria, his heir. In September, after spraining her knee and becoming completely ‘fixed’ to her chair, she tried the ‘warm bath’ at Brighton, and did not return to Homburg till the following summer.
King William IV had much to undergo in the first years of his reign. Not only was he beset by members of his family, and by members of the current and previous administrations, with exhortations and advice about Parliamentary reform. But his eldest son, George Fitzclarence, now Earl of Munster, chose this moment to denounce his father to the Duchess of Gloucester – for failing to provide him with the funds and estate necessary to the dignity of a peer. He cited a previous letter of his father in which William had refused him money: ‘Dear George, I cannot admit primogeniture, and must give 10,000 to each of your brothers and sisters before I can think of any other money for you.’ Munster pointed out to his aunt Mary ‘the utter contradiction … the virtual acknowledgement of primogeniture in raising me to the hereditary peerage.’ When Duke of Clarence, and in comparative financial difficulty, his father had made ‘every use’ of him. Now he was king, he was trying to get rid of him ‘at the cheapest rate possible.’ Munster gained nothing by his appeal to his aunt Gloucester but kind words. However, he and the ‘Fitzclarence set’ that he headed continued to hang about their father and about Queen Adelaide, who accepted their existence with pious resignation.
Meanwhile, the Duke of Gloucester left the Whigs over the issue of reform, and remonstrated with the King on the danger it presented, warning that the measures proposed would deprive him of the crown. ‘Very well, very well,’ said William equably. ‘But sir,’ the Duke pressed, inspired for a moment by wit, ‘your Majesty’s head may be in it.’ Nevertheless the second Reform Bill was approved in the summer of 1832, following a letter from William to Tory peers warning them not to vote against it again, or else he would be constrained to create enough new Whig peers to pass it. So just as Mary’s husband, when a Whig, had fallen out with her brother George IV over one Parliamentary bill in 1820 – the Pains and Penalties against Queen Caroline – so, now that he was a Tory, he fell out with her brother the new King. And once again she was in a quandary – whether to visit her brother in Brighton, where her husband would not go, or remain on uneasy terms with her husband at Bagshot.
Before his death George IV had discreetly arranged that his sister Elizabeth should no longer make repayment of Homburg state debts to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the banker in Frankfurt, without her English trustees’ approval. Early on in her marriage she had impulsively sent her jewels to the banker without her husband’s knowledge, naively wishing to secure a sum to ease Fritz’s worries about the debt he had inherited with his principality when his father died. Rothschild then informed an aghast Fritz that he could not produce the sum Elizabeth had requested for over three months, but that ‘he would buy the jewels for his wife, who would like to have them’. As Elizabeth remarked to her brother the King in England, ‘if you had seen Fritz’s face of horror. …’ Fritz said he would sell his woods rather than do as the banker suggested.
As a widow, Elizabeth continued to pay £6,000 of her ‘appanage’ from England to settle other state debts in Homburg. And with the £5,000 she kept for herself, she carried on supporting the variety of projects she had already begun while Bluff was alive. She built a new coach house and stables at the castle, and she planted an English garden, and erected buildings and follies in the Little Wood immediately below the castle. Just as Elizabeth had arranged her collection of china in her cottage at Windsor, now she installed her ‘china closet’ in a house she had built for it in the Little Wood, and ‘peu à peu’ she hoped to make the house pretty, which was now ready to receive furniture. In the Great Forest that lay beyond, she worked with a pliant Louis on a great Gothic house roofed with copper to serve as a location for woodland picnics.
In the town, she supported, among other charities, a sewing and knitting school for poor children, and arranged for the distribution of layettes for expectant mothers in need. The quality of life for inhabitants of castle and town had improved dramatically, thanks to the energy of this busy Princess. Things had, in fact, been transformed since Bluff had written home urgently from St James’s in 1818, bidding his steward to cleanse the Augean stables of the castle, and paint afresh the hallmark white tower. She was optimistic that she and her brother-in-law Louis could continue the work she had laboured at with Fritz, simultaneously to enhance the country and clear it of debt.
Elizabeth still occupied the married quarters in the castle at Bad Homburg which she and Fritz had restored with the Hesse Darmstadt architect Georg Moller, and which had become known as the ‘English wing’. When the writer Fanny Trollope visited Homburg, Elizabeth walked her, as she recorded, through ‘a suite of rooms … from the windows of which a beautiful view was enjoyed. The library contained a large and excellent collection of books. The Princess said, “I brought these volumes with me from England”, adding, with a smile, “I am very proud of my library.” Speaking of the beauty of the scenery, she said, “I can never forget Windsor and Richmond, but Germany is a glorious country.”’ Mrs Trollope stopped before a portrait of George III. ‘You know that portrait,’ said the Princess. ‘It is my father. It is quite perfect.’
But life as a dowager was not quite as agreeable as the Landgravine had hoped it would be. Optimism, Elizabeth’s chief characteristic, waxed and waned now. The children of her brother- and sister-in-law Gustav and Louise, thirteen-year-old Caroline, nine-year-old Elizabeth and their two-year-old brother Friedrich, had the scarlet fever in December. And although the children recovered, the whole family was in quarantine over Christmas. Young Elizabeth sent word to Aunt Elizabeth to say that her dolls all had the scarlet fever and she had put their clothes in the fire. ‘The poor dear children are peeling and they have forbid Gustav and Louise to come near me,’ wrote Elizabeth, ‘for the infection is much stronger at that time.’ So the Christmas tables heaped with presents that she had bought in Frankfurt for the children were not wanted this year.
Elizabeth’s letters were always full of coded allusions to the shortcomings and oddities of her in-laws at Homburg. Gustav and Louise’s habit of keeping themselves to themselves meant she saw little of their children, which upset her. But she tried to avoid ‘clashing with those whom I love … How strange it is! But one must smile often upon what would at times make me cry, for I always wish to be kind.’ She wrote again, ‘I never ask questions or meddle with anybody else’s concerns. If they tell me, I hear, if not, I do not take it ill. It is the only way to go on when one has such various people in one house …’
The numerous charities Elizabeth had established or to which she contributed at Homburg occupied much of her time. ‘I am wanted for rich and poor, halt, maimed, etc., and it is one’s duty to do what one can, and I don’t like to appear to run away, as if I would not assist,’ she told a new English acquaintance, Miss Louisa Swinburne, who had settled with her family at nearby Wiesbaden. Nevertheless, she left her cares at Homburg behind her in the first half of 1833 on a visit to her brother Adolphus in Hanover, where she lived in a whirl at his vice-regal Court. Appointed godmother to her brother’s latest child, Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, she was amused at the christening by the enormous weight of the infant’s dress and the cushions which formed part of the ensemble she had to lift to the font. Elizabeth’s sister Mary in England, another godmother, wrote to her elder Cambridge niece, eight-year-old Augusta, as the ceremony approached: ‘You have no idea how a kind and good elder sister assists a younger one.’ Augusta could save Mary Adelaide from getting into many scrapes, Mary suggested, and help her in her education. ‘I speak from experience,’ the Duchess of Gloucester wrote, ‘as I once had three elder sisters, and your Aunt Eliza who was always most particularly good natured to me when a child, always came forward to give me good advice.’
Elizabeth obliged her brother by holding a drawing room in Hanover, and an assembly afterwards. But as a widow, she explained, she never took off her black, except for a birthday. ‘Then I wear white as my grand dress, and grey for the smaller days when colours are expected.’ Abhorring idleness, she hosted a party of thirty to hear a Swede, whom her sister-in-law the Duchess of Cambridge supported, lecture on French literature. Back at Homburg she no longer sighed for London. ‘All that is going on so affects my feelings that I might unintentionally sport sentiments which would be very highly improper,’ she wrote, referring to the meetings of the first reformed Parliament. ‘I am no politician, I hate the whole trade.’ She preferred, she declared, to ‘watch my poor, my gardens, my cows’.
With widowhood and with the passing of years, Elizabeth made friends with the Cumberlands – her brother Ernest and his wife Frederica – who now lived in a house newly christened Royal Lodge across the way from Cambridge Cottage on Kew Green, but who still made visits to the Continent. Even so, she kept her distance, and when the Cumberlands paid her a visit in Homburg in the autumn of 1833, she hung back. ‘I wish to be friendly and kind, but not to push, so I don’t worry them of a morning which is better for all parties.’ No such injunction governed meetings with her nephew Prince George of Cumberland, who had been born nearly blind in one eye, and had recently lost all the sight of his good eye in a most unfortunate accident. Playing with a curtain cord at a window at Royal Lodge, he had swung it and the brass weight hit him square in the eye. The thirteen-year-old was at first thought able to see ‘much as usual’, as Prince George’s preceptor Dr Jelf told Dr Thomas Hughes, once tutor to the boy’s father. But this proved to be far from the case. ‘To see that lovely creature led about is not to be told – his good humour, his sweet way of expressing himself…’ grieved Elizabeth. And she feared that the operation planned to restore his sight would not answer. ‘The only thing is to make him forget himself,’ she declared, and consoled herself with the apparent pleasure the blind young Prince took in talking and laughing with her.
Shortly after her brother George IV’s death Sophia’s eyes too had begun to cause her trouble. She had worn spectacles for years – and had long lost the self-consciousness that years before had made her hesitate to wear them to the theatre. But now no spectacles seemed to help, and her sisters Mary and Augusta grew concerned. Nevertheless, despite her anxiety, Sophia maintained her cheerful letters to her niece. ‘Today all looks very la la,’ she wrote to Victoria early in the New Year of 1832. ‘Damp and dull, and does not tempt me much to go out, but I shall try, for if once in this season one is shut up, there is no end to it.’ She was glad Victoria was coming home to Kensington. ‘All is gay when the house is full, and I hear the sound of carriages.’ When the Kents were in town, she still went, according to her niece’s diary, almost every evening after dinner to their apartments, and sometimes played the piano with the Duchess.
And then the blow fell. Resigned as Sophy was to an existence impaired by nerves and spasms, and lately by deafness, the misfortune that befell her now required reserves of iron. ‘The affliction with which the Almighty has thought fit to try me with … is the total loss of my right eye,’ she informed her brother Adolphus in January 1832. She woke up blind in that eye on a Monday morning, and sent for Mr Alexander, the eye surgeon, after she had continued some time in the same way. ‘Pray treat me like a rational being,’ she said firmly when he arrived, ‘and tell me the real truth, for I assure you I am prepared for the worst.’ Alexander duly informed her that it was a decided cataract come in abruptly, but he did not advise the operation of couching, or removing it, while her left eye still functioned,
Sophia was remarkably spirited in the face of this setback, and continued to ride and to play music as though nothing had happened. She even decided to learn German, recalling, for her niece Victoria’s benefit, that the measles had stopped her education in that language years before. She was playing the piano a great deal, and trying some new waltzes and quadrilles – but she had to admit that what she called her ‘poor blind eyes’ were a ‘sad drawback.’
Dolls, dogs, Mr Fozard’s riding school – where Princess Sophia, the Duchess of Kent, Victoria and her governess, Baroness Lehzen, were all keen pupils – and summer holidays continued the subjects of the easy correspondence with Victoria which Sophia kept up, as the Duchess of Kent led her daughter off to ever fresh resorts and watering places. From the Isle of Wight Victoria wrote in September 1833 of her dog: ‘Dash has distinguished himself several times by swimming.’ And she was pleased to hear her aunt had ridden some other horses at Mr Fozard’s. Avril was ‘a nice quiet creature’, she agreed. ‘Still, you must have been very tired of riding her always.’ And a further letter contained the information: ‘I don’t think you will know Dash when you see him, his ears are grown so long and curly’
Princess Elizabeth in Homburg was sad not to know her niece Victoria better, or to see more of Gustav and Louise’s children, but she sought out others. A young niece of Miss Swinburne, Elizabeth’s Wiesbaden friend, was invited to visit her aunt when she was staying with the Dowager Landgravine. ‘Someone knocked at the door,’ she recalled later, ‘which, being opened, the Landgravine, a very fat old lady dressed in black, appeared with her apron full of toys and presents for us.’ Later in the day the party drove ‘all through the grounds, crossing a good many little streams with rustic bridges’. They all met at a summerhouse on an island where the Princess gave them tea. ‘She poured her own tea into the saucer to drink it, and, as we children laughed at this, she laughed too and said she was like an old English washerwoman.’
Elizabeth had been all this time hatching a charitable scheme, to benefit the poor of Hanover, where she now spent her winters. A young lady of the town, Miss Minna Witte, had written some German sonnets to accompany Elizabeth’s 1806 series of prints, The Power and Progress of Genius. These plates had now been ‘improved’ by the Hanoverian artist Ramberg, and Princess Elizabeth herself had supplied prefatory remarks in English to each of them.
In June 1833 Elizabeth wrote in great anxiety about this production to Edward Harding, once her mother’s librarian at Frogmore, who was to produce the book. There was so much to do, and she asked him to settle with Ackermann the printseller in London how many he would take. Elizabeth had an immense list of people she must send copies to, diminishing the profits – ‘out of my two hundred I give fifty to the young woman who made the poetry … she [Minna Witte] has behaved with such modesty, that I cannot say too much of her.’
‘It has turned out very well,’ the Landgravine was able to tell Miss Swinburne at last in the spring of 1834. And her dedication to Adolphus in the finished book read, ‘It will give me the greatest pleasure if this work should turn out of use to a town I so much love, and where you and all have shown me such proofs of kindness, and, without compliment, your own manner of acting has served me as an example to throw in my widow’s mite into the general Poor Box.’ The publication was a success, and the school or crèche that Elizabeth envisaged was soon founded from the proceeds. Within months there were sixteen, then thirty-two pupils. It would not be renowned for its ‘learning’, she admitted, but would be ‘of much use, for the infant children of poor women who go out to work all day; it prevents their being killed.’ She referred to incidents of these unsupervised children playing in the streets and being run down by passing carriage-horses.
Mary became, quite unexpectedly, a widow in the winter of 1834. Her husband the Duke of Gloucester had been as usual keen for the shooting season to begin, and had set off the month before to meet ‘a large shooting party at Sir George Stanley’s in Buckinghamshire’, Augusta told Ernest, while the Duchess tended her autumn garden. But he was taken ill with a fever, returned home, and – fifteen days later – died on 30 November at the age of fifty-eight. The ‘family complaint’ was, as usual, blamed for this latest royal death, the politician John Wilson Croker claiming that ‘the immediate cause of death was the internal bursting of a scrofulous swelling in the head’. At the end, the Duke had been quiet and grave. On the morning he died, being told that Princess Victoria and her mother had asked after him, he said, as the Princess wrote in her diary on 2 December, ‘Tell them that I say, God bless them, and that I love them.’ According to her sister Elizabeth, the Duchess wrote that ‘So fine a death was rarely witnessed … she should feel the better for it as long as she lived.’
But it had been all so sudden, a strange end to a curious life and a difficult marriage. The Duchess of Gloucester’s maid Mrs Gold said much later, ‘Their marriage had not been a happy one, and she was not attached to the Duke, but she had been a most humble and obedient wife, though he plagued her much and could not bear her being of higher rank than him.’ Indeed, reported her sister Elizabeth, Mary spoke of her feelings being fully alive to ‘his [the Duke’s] poor broken hearted sister who, she is aware, has lost her all in him.’ The implication was that, while Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester was a broken reed, she herself was not.
Mary had her own ideas from the beginning about how to live as a widow – in London, and without the stricken Princess Sophia Matilda’s companionship. Shortly after the Duke’s body had been placed, where his father and mother already lay, in St George’s Chapel at Windsor, she moved into his late apartments on the ground floor of Gloucester House. This was, Aunt Sophia told Princess Victoria on Christmas Day 1834, ‘a good plan for herself and her friends as the high staircase is so steep [to her former top-storey apartments], but I sometimes think she may regret the gaiety of the scene from the windows above.’ The Duchess showed no signs of regretting the view she had been obliged to enjoy after her husband had banished her to the top of the house – on the ground that she kept the downstairs drawing room untidy. Now, within a month of his death, she took over his quarters.
Princess Victoria paid an afternoon visit to her aunt Mary a few weeks later, on 1 February 1835, and wrote in her journal, ‘She looks uncommonly well. She is in the deepest mourning and shows no hair at all from under her widow’s cap.’ And Sophia wrote to Victoria that summer from Bagshot, ‘She does everything like her neighbours, and except keeping to her earlier dinner hour, I see no difference in health… and strength.’ Anxiety about her recovery from the Duke’s death was no longer necessary, Sophia wrote drily. Comptroller Currey – newly Sir Edmund – and his wife Louise were besides on hand to comfort her.
But Elizabeth, who came to England again to cheer her widowed sister in January 1835, was gloomy. ‘We are like a pack of cards,’ she wrote, ‘and run so near together that we all are sensible we are going down hill.’ Princess Augusta had always enjoyed taking exercise, boasting once ten years before that she was ‘in fine walking order’ and managed three miles every day for a fortnight at Bushey – except on two days, when it rained hard. But then she was laid up for months with a stiff knee. Although she wrote to her brother Ernest robustly when she was some way to recovery, ‘I have walked several times about my two rooms with my crutch and the assistance of [her dresser] Wright’s arm,’ from now on Augusta’s exercise was limited to airings in a carriage, and, if she wanted to promenade about the Frogmore estate, she had to resort to a garden chair. The Duke of Sussex was now blind too – at least, until he got his cataracts couched, and he would not undergo the operation until after the annual meeting of the Royal Society, of which he was president. Ernest had had a throat operation in Hanover. And Sophia’s health did not bear thinking about; as she approached sixty, her eyesight was now failing at great speed, although she continued, undeterred, her correspondence with her niece Victoria.
Princess Victoria’s responses to Sophia from Ramsgate in the autumn of 1835 gave no hint of Sir John Conroy’s attempts there, while she was ill with a fever, to make her promise that he should be her private secretary when she ascended the throne. But the incident turned Victoria, now aged sixteen, not only against Conroy but against her mother and against her aunt Sophia, his supporters.
Some years later, Victoria spoke of her aunt Sophia being ‘quite in the power and à la merci of Sir J.C. Sir John Conroy’s power over Sophia probably stemmed from his ability to turn away the bullying demands of Tommy Garth, as we have seen. But Sophia also found in Sir John a confidant of the kind she had always favoured, like Miss Garth and Sir Henry Halford, with whom she could weave conspiratorial melodrama without resolution. Victoria later recalled that ‘Princess Sophia used to court him [Sir John] more than anyone.’ The affairs of the different households at Kensington Palace and of royalty elsewhere were grist to Sophia’s mill, and Conroy was an appreciative correspondent. ‘Tell her how well she writes and always to write with the blackest stuff,’ he instructed his son Edward. Sophia, appreciative in her turn, paid a large part of the purchase price of a Welsh estate for Sir John, and bought for him besides a family house in Vicarage Gate, off Church Lane in Kensington.
Sophia might court Sir John with the purchase of residences, but she was getting old and accident-prone, now that she saw with only one eye. Victoria wrote solemnly in her diary on 26 February 1836, ‘Poor Aunt Sophia could not come to dinner as she met with a sad accident in the morning; she set her cap, handkerchief and dress on fire and came to her servants all in a blaze; most fortunately they instantly put it out and she is not much burnt; only a little on her neck and behind her ear.’ But the Princess recovered and that summer, ever intellectually curious, took up Italian lessons and read Le Favole with a Signor Guazzi. Later she acquired a new dog, and wrote to Victoria for Dash’s diet. It was very simple, her niece replied: ‘A compound of potatoes broken up and with gravy mixed up, a very few little slices of meat being put at the top of all.’
Elizabeth had cheered up over the course of her long stay in England, especially when her brother-in-law, Landgrave Louis, joined her towards its end in June 1836 and was warmly welcomed by William and Adelaide. He was the King and Queen’s companion in their coach, driving through ‘the beautiful park of Windsor’ and ‘to Busche [Bushey], a country estate of the King, where he lived before, when he was Duke of Clarence’, as the Landgrave’s chamberlain Christian Jacobi informed his wife in Homburg. Elizabeth meanwhile had been staying with Augusta during a series of unseasonable ‘cold and rainy’ days, ‘covered with mist and fog.’ She admired her sister Augusta’s management of Frogmore, where she herself had played such a part before her marriage. ‘All the plants which I saw planted, and planted so many with my own hands, we are now walking under their shade,’ she had written the previous summer. ‘I must say that Augusta keeps it in admirable order, she has taken the farm into her own hands and it is quite lovely, and the drive round her fields is very pretty and interesting to me. She is the best of mistresses, and is adored by all around her, and with reason, for being so benevolent, so kind, so good as she is I cannot tell you – she ought to have a mine. That she certainly wants, for she impoverishes herself from all going on in good deeds.’
With regret, in July 1836 Elizabeth left her elder sister – and Sophia as well – to travel back to Homburg with Louis. But as compensation her widowed sister Mary went out to Homburg on her very first visit to the Continent. From there she wrote to the Duchess of Kent ‘in high spirits.’ Being out of England, Victoria’s two aunts missed the occasion later that summer when King William turned on his sister-in-law the Duchess of Kent in front of a hundred guests. The normally affable King, aged seventy-one, spoke wildly against his younger brother’s widow, who was sitting at his right hand. Princess Victoria burst into tears, and the Duchess abruptly ordered her carriage.
The source of the King’s irritation was ostensibly that the Duchess had commandeered a suite of rooms at Kensington contrary to his express orders. But he was perhaps maddened into this unbecoming show of wrath against his sister-in-law by a very recent miscarriage that his queen, Adelaide, had suffered, defeating his hopes that a child of his own could supplant Victoria as his heir. ‘The regularity of drives and of walks on alternate days, very excellent spirits and looking particularly well’ – all these signs had led Augusta, correctly, to conclude that Adelaide was pregnant again in 1835. But this Clarence child did not transpire. With Victoria’s approach to adulthood, it was at last allowed among those of the royal family – Augusta among them – who frowned on the pretensions of the Duchess of Kent and her brother Leopold that, like it or not, Victoria would almost certainly succeed her uncle William.
‘My aunt Gloucester was taken very ill last week with a violent nervous fever,’ Princess Victoria wrote in her diary on 10 January 1837, following Mary’s return to England and journey to Brighton at the New Year, ‘and continues still very ill. She is quite delirious.’ William and Adelaide remained at Brighton with the Duchess of Gloucester, and her sanity was feared for. However, she recovered enough to order chicken broth for nourishment in the last week of January, and indeed organize payment of her servants’ wages. Shortly before her niece Victoria’s eighteenth birthday, in May 1837, the Duchess was enough recovered to host a large dinner party at Gloucester House. She was ‘very well dressed’, her niece noted, ‘and looked remarkably well, better than last year … Two men called Ganz played, one on the violin and the other on the violoncello, very well but not very amusingly’ The Princess’s majority, when she turned eighteen a month later, was warmly celebrated by her relations, and Aunt Augusta ‘made the honneurs’ at the ball that night, as the King was unwell. Whenever Victoria succeeded her uncle William, there would now be no call for her mother, the Duchess of Kent – whom King William detested – to play the part of regent, with her brother Leopold hovering.
Victoria’s accession came unexpectedly soon. In early June 1837, William IV became seriously ill and for many days the devoted Adelaide did not stir from his bedside even so long as to change her clothes. But her nursing and the efforts of Sir Henry Halford and the King’s other doctors were in vain. William Henry, Duke of Clarence, King William IV, died on 20 June. Victoria was famously called down from the bedroom she shared with her mother to hear that she was queen, and her aunt Sophia wrote to her: ‘My dear Victoria, The awful day is arrived which calls you to fill the most exalted and important station in this country.’
Despite the loss of William, all the princesses – even the Landgravine in Homburg – regarded Victoria as a sacred charge, the child of their brother Edward, and their sovereign. She in turn invited all her aunts to sup and to dine with her at Buckingham Palace, which became her new home, but Sophia had to turn down the invitations. ‘I really find my sight so rapidly diminishing that I am sensible of being a trouble.’ Looking ahead to an operation, to remove cataracts, she wrote on 16 August, ‘I therefore must look forward a few months hence to be enabled, if still wished for, to appear before you more like others.’ The natural gaiety with which Sophia had written to her Kensington neighbour was much curtailed now that she was queen.
Victoria took trouble with all her aunts, although she was absorbed by public business with her accession, and thanked the Landgravine for an album she sent to her. Elizabeth was realistic – ‘we are all so much older, that we cannot expect the sort of attachment we have been spoilt with’, she wrote, referring to the attentions of King George and King William to their sisters. But the departure of her brother Adolphus and his family from Hanover for England in the wake of their brother Ernest’s accession as king of Hanover was a cruel blow to Elizabeth. Following Salic law no woman could reign in Hanover – once an electorate, since 1813 a kingdom – and the kingdoms of Great Britain and of Hanover now had to divide. While Queen Victoria moved into Buckingham Palace, King Ernest entered with pomp into the city of Hanover, and took up residence in the palace of Herrenhausen.
After Ernest had left for Hanover, Augusta visited Royal Lodge, the home he had left at Kew, and, she reported to him, ‘your pretty little bitch terrier puppy rushed up to me in the most cordial manner’. Her remarks about the new Queen of England, however, were for a time not especially cordial. This was to be expected, perhaps, as Augusta spent a good deal of the winter following her brother William’s death with his widow Adelaide. Mary too mourned William – ‘his most hospitable home was open at all times to us’. The changes were hard to bear, she wrote to Lady Currey in July 1837, and mentioned ‘the anxiety that so youthful a Queen must occasion to all those of her relations’. Victoria had no knowledge of the world, ‘poor child’ – and she was unavoidably, ‘poor soul, completely in the hands of the Ministers.’ But soon the youthful Queen’s diary records the eagerness with which the Duchess of Gloucester forged ties with her. At Windsor, the Queen made much of her aunt Gloucester, and sat on a sofa between her and her uncle the Duke of Cambridge for an entire evening. ‘It is impossible to be with her (I must say),’ wrote the aunt to Queen Louise – whose husband Prince Leopold had become king of the Belgians – ‘though she is my niece, and not feel a particular interest about her – and she gains much on acquaintance.’
The arrival of the Cambridge family back from Hanover to live in Cambridge Cottage at Kew in the autumn of 1837 irked Victoria as much as it delighted her aunts. ‘It is a great pity Augusta is so high-shouldered,’ she noted of her fifteen-year-old cousin. The Duchess, meanwhile, told Queen Louise that Gussy – Princess Augusta of Cambridge – was ‘an affectionate creature’, and that ‘the little one’ – Princess Mary Adelaide – was ‘quite a darling and a great pet with all of us’. Victoria agreed about ‘the little one’, declaring that same month after a family afternoon at Buckingham Palace that ‘Minny [Mary Adelaide] was beyond everything merry and funny’
Just as the Duchess had feted her niece Victoria’s eighteenth birthday in May, now she gave ‘a sort of juvenile fête’ at Gloucester House to mark her niece Mary Adelaide’s fourth in November, with ‘dancing dolls, jugglers, etc’ to amuse the children. ‘I went down and saw the children and supper, and then came away,’ wrote a very adult Victoria. As her aunt Gloucester had earlier said to Queen Louise, ‘Poor dear, she is very young to be brought forth into so responsible a situation.’
On 22 December Augusta poured out all her grievances, which amounted to grief, in a passionate letter to Sir William Fremantle, who had been treasurer of the royal household since 1826. ‘I indeed lament the changes in the Great Park’s beauty,’ she told him, ‘usefulness and what is more melancholy, many individuals will greatly suffer from them. But what could be expected from a poor, young creature who is completely a puppet in the hands of others, kind and amiable as I believe her really to be. She is totally ignorant, even of her own position, and she can but trust to those who are about her. She has no taste for the country – and only likes it now because she is fond of riding – consequently an additional ride made under her own eye will very naturally have charm for her.’
Augusta became more reasonable, and considered her niece’s decision to spend six weeks a year at the Pavilion in Brighton, although Victoria did not like it, very proper. Her niece’s attentions to Queen Adelaide had been great, she conceded, and her eagerness to have members of her family about her – whom she had seen little of before she came to the throne – evidently proceeded from a good heart. But Victoria was, in turn, not always complimentary about her aunts. Three months before her Coronation, she spoke to Lord Melbourne of ‘the fuss the Princesses were in about their robes’, and told him in some amusement that the Duchess of Gloucester had offered to hold the tip of her train when she was crowned, as the Duchess of Brunswick had done for Queen Charlotte.
In time for the Queen’s Coronation on 28 June 1838 the ‘old royal family’ played out a game of ‘budge’. At St James’s, the Dowager Queen Adelaide left Clarence House, and Princess Augusta moved into it. Meanwhile at Kensington, Sophia had to find a new home, as the dilapidated part of the Palace where she and the Kents had resided was to be pulled down. It was shortly after she moved into her new residence, York House in Vicarage Place, close to the Conroys, that Sophia found that the sight in her good – left – eye was diminishing.
To the grief of her sisters Augusta and Mary, Sophia’s sight failed completely in December 1837. The operation of which she had written with such hope to the new Queen had done no good. And by the following year she could see no light at all, except when she was out of doors. Victoria visited Sophia in February 1838 with Lady Durham. ‘She tells me that day and night’, the Queen wrote in her diary, ‘she sees nothing but snow, and that only when she is brought very close to the light, she can distinguish shades. She bears it very patiently, but seems at times very much disheartened.’ In her helpless state, Sophia found, not surprisingly, a visit to her sister at Bagshot Park later that year perilous. ‘It is wonderful to me that she can be so cheerful,’ wrote the Duchess of Gloucester on 30 August. ‘She walks out a great deal and drives out with me. …’
Queen Victoria did not much like aunt Augusta’s answers to her private secretary Sir Benjamin Stephenson in April and July 1838 on the subject of Queen Charlotte’s jewels, which uncle Ernest now claimed for the crown of Hanover. On the eve of their wedding in 1761, Queen Charlotte had often told Augusta, George III had handed his bride ‘into the room where her bridal attire was placed, and he showed her the jewels in question’. They were hers, and hers to dispose of, he told her then. And Augusta had often seen her mother look at the jewels and say they were to go to Hanover, ‘in failure of a King in this country’. Princess Augusta herself wanted to know the size of Victoria’s wrist, as she was ordering a bracelet for her – a gold band or gold chains just as she liked – on which was to be mounted the Duke of Kent’s picture. This pleased her niece, but Victoria was startled when her composed aunt nearly caught fire – as her sister Sophie had before her – by standing too near to a candle when she was giving the Queen and the Prime Minister dinner.
The tireless Duchess of Gloucester gave a ball for Victoria on 5 July 1838 which the young Queen enjoyed – with reservations. ‘The rooms are of course extremely small in comparison to those here. All the windows were taken out which made it very cool, too cool almost at last,’ Victoria noted. But she did not depart till half-past three in the morning, and danced eight times, five before supper and three after. A while later the Queen recorded her displeasure with the Cambridge family, who gave her another fête: ‘The house is ill adapted for a ball, and the whole was not half as well arranged or half so gay as at Gloucester House. The heat was awful, and what was dreadful, all the candles melted and covered everybody, as well as the floor, with wax. They should at least have taken the windows out.’ The next day Victoria was still musing on her wrongs: the Duchess of Cambridge had not received her at the door, and was ‘only coming down the staircase’ when she arrived. Her aunt Gloucester, on the other hand, had very properly received her at the door, and shown her ‘every possible civility.’
The Duchess of Gloucester travelled on serenely. ‘I really pity the Queen,’ she wrote on 13 July to Ernest, ‘for she has no soul about her to tell her what she ought to do, as I really think that she is disposed to do what is right if put in the right way.’ Princess Mary was sure she knew the cause of the problem: ‘Unfortunately never having been brought up to live with any of us (though always kind when we meet) yet there is no intimacy … I hope by and by when her mind is more quiet and got more used to her situation and she finds we do not push ourselves, that she may find out how sincerely and truly we are her friends.’
Elizabeth gave up wintering at Hanover now that her brother Dolly had left the city where he had been vice-regent so long, and had taken a ‘pied-à-terre’, as she named it, in a house on the main street in Frankfurt. She had ‘neither heart, power or strength to go to Hanover’, she admitted, ‘my legs have been so very painful and weak, so care I must take of them’. This pied-à-terre would enable her to have her whist party ‘most evenings’. And, should she want more company, the castle at Bad Homburg was often as ‘full as an egg’ with a great crew of relations, including Prince Wilhelm and Princess Marianne of Prussia, ‘nephews and ladies.’ But the company there was no longer all to her taste, as earlier it had been.
Elizabeth’s relations with Gustav and Louise were no easier. ‘I hope this week to accomplish seeing some of the natives,’ she wrote, but she saw little of them and their children. ‘One must in this world make up one’s mind to contretemps,’ she added staunchly. When their elder daughter Caroline married Prince Reuss, however, she roused herself to decorate the corridors and state apartments with ‘Gothick screens’ and evergreen branches.
The wish of her imbecile brother-in-law Prince Philip of Hesse-Homburg, who lived at Greiz in Thuringia, to marry a lowborn Frau had vexed Elizabeth, but the marriage won Landgrave Louis’s acquiescence, providing it was a morganatic affair. Then Philip and his Frau came to live at the castle. It was impossible for Elizabeth to be comfortable there under such circumstances, but she promised, ‘I will do all in my power to make [the new Princess] happy, for Philip’s sake … I have made all visit her – and I went the other evening to please the natives, upon the Salle being opened for the first time near the well, which is a great event, and I made her sit next to me to let them see how very well I was with her.’
The ‘well’ to which she referred was a project of Louis’s, a spa at Bad Homburg, which Elizabeth had encouraged and helped to finance. ‘All that is doing at the Source – beautiful, all done with good taste,’ she wrote, ‘so is all the Landgrave does.’ She had prevailed on Louis not only to develop the spring or Source at Bad Homburg, but also to lay out gardens and esplanades around it, and now a Salle for refreshments. The success of the Source Elizabeth was a great pleasure to its namesake. Her portrait was hung above the entrance to the spa, and was held by everyone, she said, to be ‘like, but not flattered, tant mieuxpour moi.’
The disagreeable atmosphere in the castle receded as Elizabeth spent more and more of her time down on the promenades at the Source. ‘All those that are here appear pleased with the place and the waters,’ she reported with satisfaction. Elizabeth became with an effort resigned to much that might have annoyed her in her domestic circumstances. ‘I say to you with truth’, she insisted, ‘that no one enjoys their old age more than me, and am convinced that I have been a much happier being since the spring and summer of my life are over.’
The Landgravine, no longer lachrymose, wrote from Frankfurt to Augusta Hicks, Lady Charlotte Finch’s granddaughter, in the winter of 1838: ‘Princes, Princesses &c [have] been worrying me with questions I cannot answer – none more than the question who will the Queen of England marry. How in the world can I tell? Who most probably will be the last to know …’ Elizabeth protested, as ever, that she had no wish to ‘meddle’. But in fact, whether her aunt in Homburg knew it or not, in England Queen Victoria was weighing up the merits as a bridegroom of a certain Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, her first cousin.
The death of Landgrave Louis early in 1839 did much to undo Elizabeth’s fragile happiness and sour her mood. While she and he had together turned Homburg into a watering place of distinction, it was now for Philip and his Frau to inherit their work – and undo it, Elizabeth feared. She remarked that already the castle had begun to resemble more the unkempt building it had been on her arrival in Germany, rather than the smart home with modern comforts within medieval walls that she had made it.
Elizabeth had once before spoken of her sister Mary being much in the world. This June she thanked Sir Samuel Higgins, the Duchess’s steward, for letting her know that Mary had been ill and was recovered. But she added rancorously, Mary was ‘so taken up with the world and its amusements’ that she did not keep in touch anyway. The Dowager Landgravine shared with Sir Samuel, in lieu of her gadabout sister, some unusually hostile thoughts about her once beloved Homburg: ‘You would be half crazy was you to see any stables but mine, so dirty so hot – so unwholesome and the carriages never brushed or cleaned. I make a great fuss to keep mine in order, but the neatness of England you never will find here – privately, there is a natural love of dirt amongst the Germans that makes me wild.’ Her peevish remarks and disenchantment with German manners were born of her continuing dissatisfaction with the upstart Princess Philip’s jurisdiction in the castle on which she, Elizabeth, had lavished time and money for twenty years. With every day, she told Sir Samuel in June 1839, she regretted the death of ‘my excellent Louis’ more.
The arrival of Queen Victoria’s portrait in Homburg caused the Dowager Landgravine’s stock to rise a few points in the castle. ‘I sent it up to my sister[-in-law] Louise to look at,’ Elizabeth wrote to her niece in thanks on 26 June, ‘as she could not come down to me … I never trouble you with letters,’ she added, ‘feeling you must be rejoiced not to be plagued with them from places you know nothing about.’ In a letter she sent to Augusta on New Year’s Eve, Elizabeth was more outspoken. It ended, ‘now I am useless.’
Word came to England on 15 January 1840 that the Queen’s aunt, Princess Elizabeth, the Dowager Landgravine, had died on the 10th of that month ‘without any suffering’ at the age of sixty-nine, in what she had recently termed her ‘miserable pied-à-terre’ at Frankfurt. Only her lady, Stein, and Brawn, her maid, had been with her. True to character, the members of the Hesse-Homburg family whose very residences Elizabeth had embellished and part-financed for years came to visit, but, on reflecting that there was little they could do, went away again.
Drawn by black-plumed horses, an immense catafalque covered in black velvet and bearing on its top the coronet to which she was entitled as a princess of England carried Elizabeth’s coffin from Frankfurt through a countryside lined with mourners. To the castle of Bad Homburg to which she had come with such high expectations twenty-two years before, the procession ascended, and in the chapel there, Philip and Gustav were the chief mourners. The Anglican burial service was read at the deceased’s request, before her body was committed to the Hesse-Homburg family vault.
Landgravine Elizabeth had at the last left the capital of her estate, previously willed to Louis, back to England, with numerous keepsakes to her family there. The Duchess of Gloucester in England regretted that the Landgravine had not done more for Baroness de Stein, the German lady who had been with her for more than two decades, than leave her 500 florins and some coral jewellery, ‘instead of shawls.’ But she put no faith in Elizabeth’s in-laws to make amends. Landgrave Philip was in a ‘deplorable’ state, Mary told her brother Ernest, and Gustav and Louise, in her opinion, were ‘interested selfish dirty minded people and have shown very little feeling either.’ But to Elizabeth, her relations with her husband’s family had been a sacred duty, and her jewels she duly bequeathed to her ‘sister’ Louise – whatever her faults – in Homburg.